Want to earn a degree in flying cars? Now you can

Online school Udacity is offering the world’s first nanodegree in flying car engineering

By Nicole DiGiose,
content editor

There are many university degrees that have proven to be
timeless, but as technology evolves, some college curriculums can’t keep up
with the times. In this day and age, by the time students graduate, the
information that they learned earlier in their education could be obsolete.
Fortunately, online school Udacity is offering specialized, future-looking
nanodegree programs.

Sebastian Thrun believes that there are plenty of smart
people, but the missing link is education. Image source: Udacity.

Udacity already offers a nanodegree in self-driving
vehicles, and now, co-founder Sebastian Thrun is launching a flying car
degree program. Thrun, a 50-year-old Ph.D. computer scientist and former
Stanford University professor, has been with Udacity since its launch in 2012. He
told Reutersthat his online school’s self-driving car program has attracted 50,000
applicants since 2016, and he expects the new flying car curriculum, opening in
late February, to draw at least 10,000.

At $1,200 each, Udacity is offering two 12-week terms,
including a course in aerial robotics and another in intelligent air systems,
that provide online certification in a fraction of the time of a traditional
degree course.

In an interview with Reuters,
Thrun said that his motivation in creating the flying car program was similar to
what drove the school’s self-driving car course. According to Thrun, it’s near impossible to hire qualified people to design and engineer future
vehicles — both terrestrial and aerial — that employ advanced technology,
including robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

“There is a huge shortage of
engineers,” said Thrun, who led the team that launched Google’s self-driving
car project, now named Waymo. “There are plenty of smart people. The missing
link is education.”

A flying car degree program such as Udacity’s could fill
this gap in knowledge.

“It feels like science
fiction now,” said Thrun. “But with Google and Amazon moving in, there is going
to be enormous activity around this in the next year or two.”

Do you think that taking online courses on a website such as Udacity could pay off? Leave a comment below.